The beauty of the internet is mind boggling. There are so many ways to get a piece of the pie, most take a lot of work, and some, not so much. The best way to stay safe when monetizing your website is to use more than one source of income. Here is an example, I will use AdSense because its one of the most popular services out there. – There are some real die hard AdSense users out there, these users don’t have a job, their job is AdSense. They spend their time using AdSense to make cash, and some serious cash at that. Im talking hundreds or thousands of dollars a week and yes, even a day. They are so successful at it that they make more in a week than someone else would working for another company officially employed. But then it hits, AdSense starts to hit a slump, or they get banned for what ever reason. Their only source of income is now gone, and possibly for good. That will mean starting from step 1 all over again. All their hard work is no longer valid and they are at a financial loss. That is not a good situation and thats why by not “putting all your eggs in one basket” is a great thing.
Exploring Your Options:
If you find other sources of income like Yahoo Publisher Ads, ClickBank, Chikita, Kontera, Text Link Ads just to name a few, then they can prevent 100% loss. I am a loyal member of DigitalPoint, more specifically the AdSense section. Day after day after day I hear of people getting banned, or deleted or not being able to use AdSense anymore and all of their income is gone. Explore new ways of supporting your website, try new things. There are some really cool services out there.
I have been following ShoeMoney’s blog for a while now, he is a real inspiration for me. One post in particular got me interested in trying eBay out again. He bought some hardrives wholesale, did some research to see what they were selling for from various sources like the local BestBuy, Craigslist and even in his town. Then sold them for a price higher than he paid for.
ShoeMoney talks about how you can do this for anything as long as you know your market and how to time things right. He had an example about Harry Potter books and how much people were selling for, and it was so inflated. This kind of reminds me of when the XBOX360 and the Wii came out. People made some serious cash off those. Days that are good for this type of thing are around the holidays, more specifically, “Black Friday”. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving when everything is on sale. BestBuy, Circuit City, Walmart, Amazon, everything. Might be something to take advantage of and buy to sell later.
A lot of this might sound simple, or common sense, but setting goals is one of the most important things you can do in any variety of things. When it comes to Web Traffic, AdSense, anything really, I always start off with a goal. Once you reach that goal, raise the bar and push just as hard, if not harder. Don’t forget to celebrate once its achieved. By doing so you create more motivation to keep going and succeed In further projects or progressions on your same target. I started doing this with my website traffic. For the first year, I had a target of 25,000 page views. It was very hard at first, but i achieved it. I then raised the bar to 50,000 for the next year. I totally surpassed that and got up to 100,000. I thought to myself, hey I can really push my self on this one, so I set a goal of 1,000,000 page views for year three. Since January 07 to present I am right around the 1,850,000 pageview mark. This is all thanks to setting strong goals and sticking with them. Here is a simple way to break down goals.
This will be one of my little tid-bits of search engine optimization for the day. Use keywords in your titles. By doing so you increase the keyword density and tell search engines that this is important. Although, there are over 1,000 factors that can play into Googles algorithms, this is one small, but important thing you can do. You will also increase your chances of getting better site traffic and ad relevance if using AdSense or other keyword specific ad targeting systems.
Hi im Tim and I love to do experiments and take adventures online. Professionally I am a Digital Media Producer out of Boston, MA and design, develop and produce interactive media.
